Featured Domains

Analyzing startup domain names

What MassChallenge’s first Texas class reveals about domain name usage.

Startup accelerator MassChallenge has announced the inaugural class of 84 startups for its Texas accelerator. The companies are in a number of industries, so I thought it would be interesting to see what types of domains the companies are using.

67 of the companies in the announcement are linked to websites. Here’s the breakdown of domains they use:

.COM 56
.ORG 2
.CO 2
.NET 2
.US 1
.ME 1
.AI 1
.MEDIA 1
.CA 1

84% of the companies use .com domain names.

Let’s look at some of the companies that don’t use a .com:

FastVisa.us – the .us domain makes sense because the company helps people with U.S. immigration.

NextPlay.ai – an enterprise Artificial Intelligence startup.

Open.media – the company’s name is Open Media. OpenMedia.com has been registered since 1995.

Comments

I’ve been seeing a lot of .ai domains as I look for technology solutions myself. (AI oriented, obviously) Not too bad. I like that it’s short.

I’m surprised that none of these startups are using .io. That seemed to be the hippest one for awhile. Did it not work well or something? If so, that’s a shame. I was really rooting for it to catch on.

There’s a real chicken and egg problem here.

Obviously, to get these things to catch on, we need lots of legitimate companies out there using them for business purposes other than domain sales.

The more whom actually action these names, who advertise and use them for normative business, the better it is for domain prospectors, as well.

To use a real life example, Wall St did not become valuable solely because of real estate brokers. It became valuable because of what was done there.

Some of the newer ccTLDs have been so extensively mined by prospectors, leaving so few names for the poorest (and in some cases, dumbest) startups, that the prospectors themselves may be blocking the potential success of the name. Many businesses still undervalue names, so some just won’t buy from a domain investor at any price.

It might be good to let some decent names in new extensions go at a good rate to the first people that will actually use them… just so they can get REAL exposure in front of the general public. That’ll then eventually make other names in those ccTLDs more valuable.

Until that happens, .com will remain the “it” extension both in terms of use and in terms of what both startup and established companies will value, and thus pay for.

It’s really strange to see it take this long. Anybody who’s ever made their own yoghurt knows you need a “starter” to things to take hold. I’m surprised that investors don’t understand this. You’re really investing in nothing — mere tokens — unless you get some good occupants to create a new culture around that extension first.

I’m surprised to see the comments here. The internet is only a few decades old, and all the .com’s are sold out. Things can change so quickly, and a few years from now we have no idea what the internet (or digital world) will look like. It makes sense to me that companies in need of a brand will look to new options, rather than using URLs will dashes and multiple words in them. It wouldn’t surprise me to see these new TLD’s become common place in a few years. All it will take is a few popular brands to make them mainstream, and then the others will follow…